The use of films for the administration of active agents, such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetic and other materials, is becoming increasingly popular. Such films should have a fairly uniform size, and a substantially uniform distribution of components. The substantially uniform distribution of components is quite important when the films include pharmaceutical components, to ensure accurate dosages.
Films may be formed in any desired fashion, and in some cases it may be useful to form a film on the surface of a substrate. The use of a substrate to form film not only provides ease in processing but may also aid in packaging the film products. Typically, a wet film-forming matrix is deposited onto the surface of a substrate, and then dried to form the resulting film, which is then sized and cut into individual film strip products. Unfortunately, however, such typical processes result in a great deal of wasted film due to the sizing and cutting process.
Further, traditional processing methods use one pumping mechanism with multiple slot dies or other orifices. Such methods have a tendency to dispense a wet film forming matrix unevenly through orifices, giving irregular and non-uniform dosages. In addition, in the case of film matrices having a high solid or particle content, the orifices may have a tendency to become blocked. The use of one pumping mechanism for multiple orifices may not provide enough pressure to release the blocked orifice, resulting in certain orifices dispensing higher amounts of the film-forming matrix. Thus, the end result of such traditional processing is a potential for uneven dosaging and products that lack compositional uniformity.
The present invention seeks to solve the problems incurred with traditional film processing, such as by providing a method that continuously produces film products without the need for sizing the film products, while at the same time providing uniform film dosages.